Culture Clues

Title: Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Penguin Group

Diamond is well known for his best seller ''Guns, Germs and Steel''. In his new book “Collapse” (2005) Diamond again describes environmental and structural factors but this time to explain why some societies failed to flourish and eventually vanished from the face of the earth. Though the variables change, the underlying problems in every case remain the same: too much strain being placed on limited resources. In all the cases Diamond diagnoses a similar pattern of catastrophe: environmental damage (usually deforestation leading to soil erosion, food shortages and eventually social and political crises), worsened by other factors like climate change, shifting trade patterns and short sighted leadership. Diamond shows the reader the danger for modern societies; he draws parallels between past societies and modern societies. Of course, the metaphor is imperfect. Our situation today differs in important respects from that of past societies. Some of those differences increase the danger of us, some in our favor. Diamond takes an interdisciplinary viewpoint; in this review I will focus on the points where he lightly touches culture.

The 18th century Vikings, while meeting native people in Greenland, encountered their own prejudices against “primitive pagans”. The questions whether to kill them or rob them or trade with them or marry them or take their land, and the question of how to convince them not to flee or fight didn’t receive any attention. Other civilizations have done, and are doing much the same thing. They refuse or are unable to learn from the Inuit, and the Norse, although in favor of many more tools, rather than the Inuit became the ones who disappeared. The problem was that the Norse simply couldn’t adapt to the country’s changing environmental conditions. Diamond writes, for instance, of the fact that nobody can find fish remains in Norse archaeological sites. Why did the Norse choose not to eat fish? Because they weren’t thinking about their biological survival. They were thinking about their cultural survival. It was part of what it meant to be Norse, and if you are going to establish a community in a harsh and forbidding environment all those little idiosyncrasies, which define and cement a culture are of paramount importance. “The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity”, Diamond writes.

Just as Australia was more British than Britain itself in the 1960’s, Europe’s most remote outpost of Greenland remained emotionally tied to Europe. The insistence on “We are Europeans” becomes more serious when it leads to stubbornly maintaining cows in Greenland’s climate, diverting manpower form the summer hay harvest, refusing to adopt useful features of Inuit technology, and starving to death as a result. When people go abroad they tend to emphasize their national identity more than when they live in their home country. Consequently there is a tendency that Americans for example tend to be more American if they work internationally than Americans back home in the US.

When we work abroad we shouldn’t change our identity because we will get lost. But we should be able to adapt to a changing environment. Diamond continues that two types of choices seem to have been crucial in tipping their outcomes towards success of failure: long term planning, and willingness to reconsider core values. The first choice depends on the courage to practice long-term thinking and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they have reached crisis proportions. This type of decision-making is the opposite of the short-term reactive decision-making that too often characterizes Western societies.

Of the former two halves of the overpopulated nation of Pakistan, the eastern half (independent since 1971 as Bangladesh, score on Long Term Orientation = 40) adopted effective family planning measures to reduce its rate of population growth, while the western half (still known as Pakistan, score on Long Term Orientation = 0!) did not and is now the world’s sixth most populous country. In Japan (score on Long Term Orientation = 80) the elite and the masses recognized their long-term stake in preserving their own forests, to a degree greater than for most other people. Living in a stable society without input of foreign ideas, Japan’s elite and peasants alike expected the future to be like the present, and future problems to have to be solved with present resources.

The other crucial choice illuminated by the past involves the courage to make painful decisions about values. Which of the values that formerly served a society well can continue to be maintained under new changed circumstances? The Greenland Norse refused to sacrifice part of their identity as a European, Christian, pastoral society, and they died as a result. The government of China restricted the traditional freedom of individual reproductive choice, rather than let population problems spiral out of control. How much of our traditional consumer values and First world living standard can we afford to retain?

Collapse is a wide-ranging and informative book that raises troubling questions. It's also a demanding book and no light read. But Diamond writes well enough to make the journey enjoyable.